NYFF/Views from the Avant-Garde/A Letter to Uncle Boonmee

The schedule for this year's Views from the Avant-Garde series at the New York Film Festival is now online, and as I had hoped, master Thai filmmaker Apichatpong ("Joe") Weerasethakul's new 17-minute short, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, is included. The photos above are taken from Joe's own website, http://www.kickthemachine.com/, where he tells a little bit about the inspiration for the film:

"A few years ago I visited a temple near my home and a monk there gave me a little book called “A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives.” In it, the monk wrote about Boonmee, who could recall his multiple lives in the cities of the northeast. In 2008, I wrote a screenplay inspired by the reincarnation of Boonmee, and started to travel in the region in search of his surviving offspring and relatives. I met his two sons who provided accounts of their father. In Nabua in December 2008, I located several houses that I thought would be suitable as Uncle Boonmee’s house in the proposed feature film. This short film is a personal letter describing my Nabua to Uncle Boonmee. The film is comprised of shots of the houses’ interiors in the evening. They are all deserted except one house with a group of young soldiers, played by some teens of Nabua. Two of them impersonate me by narrating the film."

I watched another recent Apichatpong short, Phantoms of Nabua, which was briefly available online a few months ago, and was enchanted with it even on my small laptop screen. I expect the new film, seen on the Walter Reade screen, to truly whet my appetite for Joe's upcoming Uncle Boonmee feature.

The screening times of the main selections are also now posted, and I've added another film to my must-see list, the three-hour independent Chinese documentary Ghost Town. According to some critics, the film's director, Zhao Dayong, may be the next major Chinese filmmaker to emerge since Jia Zhangke.

I've narrowed down my essential NYFF choices to about eight films now. Besides Zhao's film, I'll definitely be seeing the new Alain Resnais, Manoel de Oliveira, Maren Ade, Raya Martin, Claire Denis, Souleymane Cissé and Joao Pedro Rodrigues. The maybe column includes another eight, von Trier, Rivette, Breillat, Solondz, Costa, Porumboiu, Bellocchio and Haneke (all worth seeing, though many of them have distributors already).

UPDATED SEPTEMBER 1: With Juan's help I've now ordered all my tickets, a staggering total of 15 programs in 17 days (assuming I get all the tickets I've ordered). I'm seeing all those mentioned above, minus the Breillat, Bellocchio and Haneke (I'll wait for theatrical release), and adding L'Enfer de Henri-Georges Clouzot, a reconstruction of Clouzot's uncompleted 60s experimental film.

Mikio Naruse and Hirokazu Kore-Eda

Following a recent screening of Hirokazu Kore-Eda's wonderful Still Walking at BAM, the director was asked the inevitable question of whether this family comedy-drama was influenced by the films of Ozu. While there is some similarity to Tokyo Story in the film's family gathering at a memorial service, along with some shots of passing trains, burning incense and the like, Kore-Eda replied that while he respects Ozu, he was much more influenced by the films of Mikio Naruse, whose characters he described as "sad and hopeless." Coincidentally, I had just rented the British Masters of Cinema DVD of Naruse's Flowing, which gave me the opportunity to compare these two directors' worldviews.

Kore-Eda said he based his script for Still Walking in large part on extensive conversations he and his sister had with their mother in the months before her death. There is obvious love and affection for this family, but also a clear-eyed look at the casual cruelties inflicted upon the surviving son, Ryota, who fails to live up to the expectations held for the idealized other son Junpei, who drowned 15 years earlier. There is also the shockingly callous revelation that the troubled, obese man whom Junpei saved from drowning has been invited to the annual memorial services in order for them to ridicule and belittle him, in effect to punish him for inadvertently being the cause of Junpei's death. The film takes place in the span of one day and night, except for a short coda several years later that shows the continuity of generations while subtly revealing changes in Ryota's life that were hinted at previously. The visual economy of this final sequence is extremely moving.

Naruse's great film Flowing depicts another sort of "sad and hopeless" family, the various residents of a geisha house fallen on hard times. The characters are constantly counting money or trying to collect old debts, all in an effort to keep this somewhat disreputable business afloat. Naruse regular Hideko Takamine is superb as the owner, and stalwart Mizoguchi heroine Kinuyo Tanaka is even better as the new maid. Takamine's daughter, who has seen too much of the pennypinching misery and drunkenness of these women, is determined to take a menial sewing job rather than follow in her mother's business. The documentary-like shots of the town and the river punctuate the drama with a contemplative, poetic refrain similar to, if less rigorous than, Ozu's famous "pillow" shots. I'm eager to catch up with the rest of the Masters of Cinema Naruse set, each of which has a visual essay by critics Kent Jones and Philip Lopate.

Brit Noir

Hell Is a City

It Always Rains on Sunday

Thanks to Film Forum I'm currently enjoying the opportunity to sample a few of the 40-some selections from a genre I had not previously seen grouped together, namely British film noir from the late 30s to early 60s. Noir is normally associated with postwar Hollywood directors (many of them European) such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Jacques Tourneur, Anthony Mann, Andre de Toth, Nicholas Ray, Joseph H. Lewis, Don Siegel, et al. The Film Forum series proves that, while overshadowed by the vast array of talents that American noir had to work with, the Brits were still managing to turn out an impressive body of dark, cynical films that remain largely unknown in the U.S.

Carol Reed's The Third Man and Odd Man Out are well-known and masterful examples of the genre, but a film like Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday deserves to be recognized as a major work, about a particularly dreary Sunday in the life of lonely housewife Googie Withers (a marvelous actress in a heartbreaking performance). A fugitive convict who was once her lover re-enters her life as she attempts to hide him in her home and facilitate his escape. A brief flashback, in which Withers is seen strikingly as a blonde, contrasts her youthful passion for bad boy John McCallum with her dreary, cramped existence on this particular rainy Sunday. Her dream of reliving the earlier affair is obviously doomed, but she goes to heroic efforts to guard the secret of the stranger in her bedroom. Hamer's complex, suspenseful screenplay is aided by Douglas Slocombe's expressionist lighting, particularly during the final chase in a train yard. The inevitability of the outcome is made all the more tragic by the genuine erotic longing and sense of lost opportunities between these two characters.
Stanley Baker is one of the major stars of Brit noir, appearing in three of the best films in the series, Val Guest's gritty Hell Is a City, Cy Endfield's politically-charged Hell Drivers and Joseph Losey's stylish The Criminal. I haven't seen the latter in a while and plan to catch it on August 30. Other upcoming highlights include tonight's October Man, Brighton Rock (Aug. 28-29), and Michael Powell's amazing color noir, Peeping Tom (Sept. 2-3).

In Praise of Rensais

Muriel

Last Year at Marienbad

Le Chant du Styrene

New York Film Festival Preview II

Ne Change Rien (top), Independencia (middle), To Die Like a Man (bottom)

Here are images from three more of my must-see films, all by important directors making their belated New York Film Festival debuts this year.

The lovely black and white shot of actress Jeanne Balibar is from Ne Change Rien, a very personal documentary about Balibar's singing career by Pedro Costa, director of the extraordinary Colossal Youth. It's certain to be a visual treat.

Then there's a film by a very different Portuguese director, João Pedro Rodrigues, To Die Like a Man. This is Rodrigues's third feature but the first to appear in the festival, for which I credit Dennis Lim, a newcomer to the festival Selection Committee this year and a major champion of Rodrigues's work. See his fascinating article/interview in the recent Cannes issue of Cinema Scope magazine. (http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs39/spot_lim_rodrigues.html) I loved Rodrigues's first two films, O Fantasma and Odete (Two Drifters). He specializes in movies about marginal or outsider gay characters, and Lim compares To Die Like a Man, a feel-bad film about an aging drag performer, to one of the best recent gay films, Jacques Nolot's frankly autobiographical Before I Forget. Expect some audience walkouts with this one, which as my friend Juan says is part of the fun.

The festival chose not to include the controversially violent Cannes best screenplay winner, Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay, in favor of another emerging Filipino director, Raya Martin's Independencia. The program describes it as a "stylized tale of a mother and son hiding in the mountains after the US takeover of the islands." I'm eager to see this work by the acclaimed, if virtually unknown, Martin. Independencia and To Die Like a Man are the kind of challenging works that the festival should be applauded for including alongside more mainstream arthouse favorites like Almodovar (predictably grabbing the Closing Night slot with Broken Embraces) and Haneke.

The Centerpiece film is the highly regarded Sundance feature with the unwieldy title Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Also promising are Min Ye, Malian director Souleymane Cissé's first new film in over a decade, and Maren Ade's Everyone Else, which comes highly praised by Kent Jones in the current Film Comment.

To wrap up, there will be a screening of what is purportedly the oldest surviving Korean film, Crossroads of Youth, a 1934 silent film which will have live music and a benshi-style offscreen narrator. This should be a memorable event. With so many interesting films, many without a distributor, I will probably set a new record this year for the number of films I attend.

There are also sidebars on classic Chinese cinema and Indian musical director Guru Dutt. The films are yet to be announced, as is the lineup for Views from the Avant-Garde and perhaps a couple revivals at the Walter Reade Theater. Stay tuned.

New York Film Festival Preview

Police, Adjective (top), Antichrist (middle),
Wild Grass (bottom)

The lineup for this year's 47th New York Film Festival has just been posted (http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.html) and it looks to be one of the strongest in years. Considering the rather disappointing selections from Cannes this year, at least from major directors in the competition, the NYFF's selection committee has done a mostly outstanding job this year. My biggest regret is the absence of Hong Sang-Soo's Like You Know It All. Last year the NY Times's Manohla Dargis trashed Hong's wonderful Night and Day, criticizing alleged "programmer loyalty", which may have played a part in Hong's exclusion this year. Night and Day sadly remains without American distribution. I would also have liked to see Ken Loach's Looking for Eric, Jane Campion's Bright Star, and Lou Ye's Spring Fever in the festival, but there are still plenty of films to look forward to. [UPDATE 11/3: Night and Day has been distributed by IFC Films and recently played at Anthology Film Archives; Bright Star opened theatrically in September.]

Most eagerly anticipated for me is the Opening Night selection, Alain Resnais's Les herbes folles (Wild Grass). Resnais is probably my favorite still-active director from the era of the Nouvelle Vague, although technically not part of the Cahiers du Cinema group that included Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Rivette, et al. If I treasure Resnais above even Godard today, it's because of his unequaled mastery of a beautiful and highly formalist mise-en-scene coupled with a profound sympathy for his characters. This carries through from his 60s masterpieces Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel and the underrated Je t'aime, je t'aime, all of which played with the nature of time in thrilling ways, through Providence and Stavisky in the 70s, to a highly theatrical masterpiece like Mélo in the 80s and up to the recent Coeurs. Since the 80s Resnais has worked repeatedly with the great Sabine Azéma and André Dussollier (pictured above), who star in Wild Grass along with Arnaud Desplechin regulars Mathieu Amalric and Emanuelle Devos. I've always avoided the overhyped opening and closing night films at the NYFF but I'll make an exception this year.

Second on my list is Claire Denis's White Material. The festival failed to include Denis's previous film, the great 35 Rhums (opening this fall at Film Forum), so I give them credit for snagging this one before it has even premiered at Venice. Denis returns to some of the themes of her debut film Chocolat as, in the words of the festival blurb, "A handful of Europeans try to make sense of--and survive--the chaos happening all around them in an African country torn apart by civil war." Isabelle Huppert and Denis icon Isaach de Bankolé star.

My third choice would be the highly acclaimed film Police, Adjective (top left) by Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, director of the beautifully observed comedy 12:08 East of Bucharest.

Cahiers veteran Jacques Rivette also has a film in the festival, 36 Vues du Pic Saint Loup. Other notable auteurs represented are Lars von Trier with Antichrist (above right), the scandal of Cannes, which is probably worth seeing if for no other reason than the prizewinning performance of Charlotte Gainsbourg; Catherine Breillat's Bluebeard; Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or winner The White Ribbon; Marco Bellocchio's Mussolini biopic Vincere; and 100-year-old Manoel de Oliveira's Eccentricities of a Blonde.

More to come in a second post.